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Mikheil Saakashvili

Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia and his political team – United National Movement have been very tough on soviet symbols in Georgia. During their parliamentary rule a law was passed that required all soviet symbols to be taken down from public buildings. They also removed monuments of Stalin from Gori (Stalin’s hometown) and other parts of Georgia. After the October 1, 2012 parliamentary election, when Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream came to power elderly citizens of Georgia began to re-erect Stalin’s monument in various parts of Georgia. For example in this video called “Glory to big Stalin” people say what a great person Stalin was and what great things he has done:

This fact has upset the other part of Georgians who decided to fight against resurrection of Stalin monuments by painting them pink. And this is the result:

The President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili and the leader of Georgian Dream coalition Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is set to become the Prime Minister of the country, met on October 9 at the presidential palace. The meeting, that was also attended by representatives of the current government and Georgian Dream coalition, lasted for about 35 minutes after which both Saakashvili and Ivanishvili gave commentaries to public. After the first images were out, Georgians on Facebook began to react. Some of them claimed that Ivanishvili looked mad, some wrote that Saakashvili looked sad, others said that the meeting looked like El Clasico (A football match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona), etc.

Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia has released a detailed data about foreign visitors to Georgia. Tourists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Russia are leading the list and only 5% of visitors are from the EU. According to MIA, 1,793,449 foreign arrivals have been recorded in January-August, 2011 (2,031,695 people traveled to Georgia in 2010). Most of them were from Azerbaijan – 456,282, 455,611 from Turkey, 448,374 from Armenia and 176,090 from Russia.

S22E14 of The Simpsons featured the Golden Globe Awards where one of the nominees for the best animated short was a movie called Saakashvili Spring. Bart Simpson won the award with his autobiographical short called Angry Dad.